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Kurdish nationalist
Barham Saleh, a thin man, with an affable smile,
sits in the Iraqi Government's halls of power.
That a Kurd, who champions his ethnicity, serves as
Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister would have been
unthinkable under jailed dictator Saddam Hussein.
"We are talking about a new political and social
contract in Iraq. We cannot afford another eight
decades of ethnic discrimination and ethnic cleaning
in Iraq," Saleh of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK) tells AFP, explaining his role in the national
Government.
But mindful of Saddam's past campaign to gas and
raze villages, men like Saleh have vowed 'never
again' and want to make loud and clear they are not
formally bound to Iraq's Arab majority.
"If they want us to be Iraqis, we have to be treated
as full citizens of the state and not second-class
citizens. Those days are over," Saleh says.
He advocates a federal system for Iraq, a principle
already enshrined in the country's transitional
constitution.
The Deputy Prime Minister embodies Iraq's messy
experiment in democracy, brought on with the US
invasion in 2003 that shattered the old order of
Saddam Hussein and left the country's mosaic of
Kurds and Shiites and Sunni Arabs to hammer out a
new power structure.
He is both conciliatory and wary of the new
co-habitation in Baghdad.
"If Iraq were to turn back towards dictatorship and
apartheid and ethic cleansing, I think most Kurds
would not feel safe in a country like that," he
says.
Again and again, Saleh and other Kurdish leaders
have aggressively pushed their case in Baghdad,
playing brinkmanship politics to guarantee their new
stature in Iraq where for decades they were the
enemy.
The Kurds played hardball in December and January
over the issue of the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk,
which the Kurds want to claim for their northern
self-rule enclave.
Saleh and other leading lights of the PUK and the
Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) threatened an
election boycott over the Iraqi Government's failure
to award the vote to those thousands of Kurds
expelled from Kirkuk under Saddam.
But faced with growing Kurdish anger, the Iraqi
Government finally buckled and allowed an estimated
100,00 displaced Kurds from Kirkuk to vote in the
city, effectively handing power in the community to
the Kurds.
"We believe Kirkuk is an integral part of the
Kurdistan region. We have an abundance of historical
and demographic documents and data that proves this
point."
The Kurds believed their victory was long overdue
and say it presages plans to reclaim land across
Diyala, Kirkuk, Salahuddin and Nineveh province,
which were lost under Saddam's policy of expulsion.
Saleh wants to see lost territory taken back in the
coming years and reincorporated into northern
Kurdistan via legal means.
"Saddam has imposed that (frontier) line and pursued
the most vile and violent ethnic cleansing campaign
to affect the demographic characteristics of those
territories. The Kurdish leadership has rightly
accepted the legal process by which ethnic cleansing
would be reversed."
Kurds hold the ministries of foreign affairs,
displacement and migration, human rights and public
works, and the post of minister of state for women
and vice president. PUK officials warn they want a
seat on Iraq's three- person presidency in the next
Government.
Last summer, Kurdish officials bolted Baghdad until
Saleh and others were reassured they would have heft
in the interim Government.
The Kurds are expected to play a power broker role
in the next parliament, serving as a bridge between
religious Shiite legislators and secular Arabs.
A tribal society, long nurturing the dream of a
Kurdish homeland stretching across the frontiers of
Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, the last decade, after
the 1991 Gulf War, gave these tough mountain people
a first taste of the independence denied to them for
centuries.
Led by Massud Barzani, head of the KDP, and Jalal
Talabani, head of the PUK, the Kurds have put aside
years of quarrels and internal rivalries as they
navigate their way through post-Saddam Iraq.
AFP
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